Johan's Vision
by Kaiyosei
Summary: An insight on the various aspects of Johan's personality and his views on several of the universal themes of the story- the laughable tragedy of humanity, the significance of names, and the scenery at end of the world.


I've wanted to make a _Monste_r story for practically forever, but never knew how to begin. _Monster_ is probably the greatest work of manga art that I've ever encountered; it explores concepts far deeper than any other piece I've ever seen, and the storytelling and pacing is absolutely masterful. I doubt that I'll find another manga series so superb and purely brilliant. Even seemingly unimportant diversions from the main storyline, like the story of the former police officer whose moral compass seemed to rust as he grew more experienced, or the assassin who stopped killing after he saw a man put five spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, are some of the most beautiful parts of the entire story.

So anyway, here it is. A somewhat short collection of Johan's thoughts, written as thoroughly as I possibly could write it. It's very disturbing, which shouldn't be too surprising considering that this is Johan, but this story reflects my perception of Johan as honestly as I can describe. The ending strays from the real ending since this is supposed to take place within Johan's mind, as my view of what Johan believed should happen on the doomsday. Reviews would be very much appreciated, since this is the most serious and dark piece of writing I've done thus far.

Disclaimer: I do not own _Monster_, obviously, though I wish I were capable of creating such an amazing work of art.

--

**Johan**

Humans. So fragile, so delicate. So controllable.

The key to destroying them, tearing apart the core that sustains their volatile sanity, is such a simple thing. All you need is access to their innermost feelings, to delve into the darkness of their weak hearts. To acknowledge them and feign sympathy, concern, kindness, as they spill out the secrets they could never confide in anyone else. They cling pathetically to the approval of others, endlessly seeking acceptance from their kind. Without it, they shrivel and slowly die.

For it is the way such beings are built. They must be constantly reminded of their existence, their significance; the one thing they cannot provide themselves. And because they are all so needy and dependent, constantly requiring the approval of others, they can be manipulated to do anything. Humans can become anything.

You simply need to convince them that you are the sole entity that can provide them assurance of their existence, the only one that truly understands them. Without you, they are nothing. And so you carve a hole in their heart, a dependency that only grows deeper and deeper as they hold on to you tighter and tighter, believing that you are the source of their life. You isolate them from the outside world, making them believe you are the only thing that matters, that no one else is there to help them.

And then, you ask a few little things. They cave in to your demands, slowly at first. As they sink further and further into desperation, it becomes so easy. Their erratic minds are completely subject to your every little suggestion, every tiny insinuation you extend to them. Their feeble hearts are slowly drained of all internal will or strength, and they eventually break like thin, brittle shards of glass strewn across a concrete floor. All that is needed to touch them off, to shatter them, is a gentle touch, a small assertion of force from the foot. Soon, as more and more people wither and then crack through such methods, you have an infinite amount of resources. An army of cold, lifeless shells willing to obey you unquestioningly.

That's why it's so simple to kill and escape without the tiniest grain of suspicion ever being thrown in your direction. When you can control people, manipulate every desire of their hopeless hearts, it's never necessary to commit murder in person. So long as you stand above them all, the master hand guiding the soulless puppets, you can never be caught. It is simple to sever an invisible thread. And it can never be traced back. The strings simply disappear, like the mannequin they were once attached to, into the void of forgotten things. Of things that no longer exist.

Like my name.

--

A name is such a commonplace thing, so unimportant and easily forgotten in the grand scheme of things, and yet it is what defines us all. The marks we leave behind on this dark earth must always come back to our true names. Who can remember a nameless man, lost in the course of history? No matter what the significance of his deeds, who can identify a fictitious man by his achievements alone? Without a name, people are fictitious- there is nothing to confirm their existence, no solid point of reference to return to. For without names, we fade into the nothingness of the world, forgotten in death as in life. Names are everything. They are at foremost the only true proof that we have existed.

And I have no name.

_My name is Otto. My name is Hans. My name is Thomas. My name is Johan._

Like the monster in the fairytale, I can have any name in the world. I can take each name I encounter and consume it, supplanting my missing name with that word. Because I have no name, I can become anything. Anything at all.

But no matter what it is that I become, no matter how many names I wear and shed, I am incomplete. I cannot be whole until I find my twin sister, my other half. The one who calls herself Nina, who has forgotten what we are.

She is me and I am her.

She has no real name. We are two nameless monsters, divided and derived from a single monster, roaming the earth in search of our true names.

Anna. That was my mother's name. She had a real name.

She was another part of me. Another fragment of my existence. She was the monster that first split into two, the original.

I still recall vividly that day, when that terrible man came to us. Franz Bonaparta. Klaus Poppe. Emil Scherbe. He had so many names, so many false identities. Like the monster in the storybook, he killed indiscriminately, sparing no one.

Only he has a real name.

That is the unbridgeable chasm between us. Though he created me, I am far greater than he. Because I have no name. And that which is unknown becomes an illusion of fear, a gaping hole of terror and darkness. An abyss that humans fall into and never escape. And so my nameless reality only feeds the ever-growing monster inside of me.

It was because of him that I never learned my name.

We were constantly watched. Mother was always so paranoid, so terrified. She said that there were wicked people trying to find us and take us away. So we needed to dress exactly the same, speak in exactly the same voice, become the same person. We could let on to no one that there was any more than one girl and her mother living in the house. No one could discover that we were twins. The boy had to fade into the background, disguised as his sister. His identity was lost in the confusion.

And even she couldn't distinguish the two of us from each other.

And then one day the doors opened, and my mother's face contorted in pure despair. I was still dressed as a girl, a perfectly demure mirror image of my sister, when _they_ came. Their ugly, inhumanly distorted faces leered at us, reflecting the vast pools of greed that drowned their minds. Except that one man whose expression revealed nothing. The one who watched so carefully with those cruel, calculating eyes. Franz Bonaparta.

I understood everything. Though I clung to my mother's hanging dress, my eyes brimming with tears, like any ordinary child in the face of terror, I could see what was happening all around me. They had come to take us away. And then the cold man spoke.

"This is an experiment. Which will we take, and which will we leave behind? This is an experiment."

My mother's face was hard, stonier and more impenetrable than any other I have seen since that day. She gripped us tightly, painfully. This was the pain of her love, the terrible strength unleashed when a mother is faced with the looming danger of eternal separation from her children. She had to do the unthinkable in choosing between her twins, her own children. She clutched the boy and girl so hard that her hands became vividly colored with white blotches of tension. She refused to let them go.

But she was so desperate, so overwhelmed with her own sorrow, that she forgot them. She forgot that they would remember, years and years later, the choice that she made on this day, the worst day of her life. She did not think about how they would recall these events, how deep these scars would run. She did not explain to the boy why she had kept him for herself, why she had betrayed his sister to her doom.

And every day from that day on, he could not help but wonder if it was really his sister that she had meant to give away.

Even now, it is the one truth I cannot discern based on my memories alone. Did she hand my sister over because she truly loved me more? Or was it for some other, twisted ulterior motive that she finally chose, after confused bouts of tortured indecision, to save me?

Or maybe she could not tell us apart as she glanced back and forth, from my sister to me. Perhaps it was a mistake that my sister was condemned and I was spared. But no matter what her rationale was, no matter how confuddled and despair-driven her intentions were in the heat of that deadly moment, there is one solid, indisputable fact.

One of us was unwanted.

--

I have seen the end many times. Necessarily I must be there, standing as a survivor at the demise of the world. All humans, in their weakness and selfishness, will eliminate each other in a massive slaughter. And I will stand atop the field of scattered corpses, watching as the remaining combatants struggle like ants, scampering and beating others down in a futile effort to save their own worthless lives. For I am above this litter of wild beasts in the forms of men, far beyond their sight. Like the Devil overseeing the torment of Hell from his high throne, gazing in apathy and amusement at the suffering mortals lost in the flames.

When hysteria is scattered across the paths of the world like fuel for flames, and the unassailable feelings of suspicion and fearful tension drain the moisture from the air, the inferno of hatred begins to burn, its mere touch searing all of humanity into heavy black ashes. All that is needed is a single spark, releasing the slightest whiff of smoke, to initiate the combustion of the world and smother all life. Just create a little panic, make people believe that everyone else is out to kill them. And then the entire sequence of events unfolds, like a perfect domino formation. A little exertion of force is all it takes; the pressure builds as each piece in the chain of the world falls. And suddenly the whole line of dominoes has been toppled. Because after all, it's in their natures. Rather than fall alone, forgotten by all, they choose to bring each other down. That is why they will all die in the end, by their own doing.

Indeed, that is the case with any average person. And yet the one who is chasing me, the one who saved my life so long ago, seems immune to this corruption. Ah, yes. Doctor Tenma.

But I can easily take advantage of his innocence, his inability to kill and his desire to save lives. For the vision that I now foresee, the scenery of the doomsday, is a fitting end to it all. It is beautiful on so many different levels. The perfect destruction of the world of the living. It has become the world of the nameless.

I can imagine it in my mind.

A vast wasteland as far as the eye can see. The distant mountains accentuate the darkness, the unobtainable quality that permeates the silent air. There are few remnants of life; several barren trees sparsely decorate the background, their branches beginning to drag downward as gravity and time drain their life away. There are no seasons, no record of time. The hard ground is empty and naked, like a winter without snow. The sky is as it always is before a devastating storm, sheeted in dense, dark gray clouds that swirl ceaselessly in anticipation. It is cold, but not piercingly so. The coldness is a strange and undefined mass that hangs in the air; it burdens but does not crush, chills but does not freeze. The sun is directly overhead this scene of lifeless emptiness, but its form cannot be seen from above the massive clouds. There is enough light only to cast a shadow.

And a few paces from one another, facing each other directly, are the last two people left in this desolate region of the earth. Doctor Tenma and myself. For Tenma will not be corrupted by fear for his own life, nor by selfish anger and hatred. He will survive, trying to save other lives until the very end. He cannot falter in his kindness, his altruistic intentions and desire to help innocent people. So in the very end, it will come down to this. The two of us remain, survivors in a dead world, opposite like darkness and light.

Ah, but it is not quite so simple as that. There is an inevitable twist.

He is the one with the gun in his hand, firmly clutching the trigger as he crouches in firing position. And I am bare, weaponless. Unable to defend myself. I simply raise my pointer finger to the very center of my forehead, to signify that he must shoot there. And at that small motion, he shall end a life, the life of a monster who fed on the anger and misery of the world until only ashes remained.

But at the moment he releases the trigger, I win. He will not be able to understand why I must die at the very end. But I see everything. My death will be the last proof that there is no good in this universe of darkness and pain.

For he is the most incorruptible human alive. The one who values human life so highly, who cannot bring himself to kill another human being even to save his own life. The once-innocent, trusting man who believed that all lives are equal, that all lives have the same worth. Tenma is the living embodiment of the goodness in humans, of all the things that sustain their feeble lives in the midst of wickedness and despair.

He has been pursuing me relentlessly for some time now. Seeking to save the rest of the mankind from me by murdering me himself. Staining his hands with the blood of a monster, so that no more blood will spill from the monster's hands onto the weeping earth. Stripping away his own innocence, his own happiness, to spare that of others. A perfect sacrifice.

And when he finally kills me, driven by vengeance for the fate that I have wrought on humanity, he will unknowingly destroy himself and all that he stands for. He will finalize the destruction of light, and love, and all those things that separate humans from monsters. By taking my life, he will have allowed me to conquer the one thing incapable of being conquered. The very core of good in this world will be forever tainted with the indelible mark of evil. And I will have turned the only true human, the one so resolute and uncompromising in his will to do what is right, into a monster.

For it is a law of existence that the only thing that can destroy a monster is a greater monster.

And now the greater monster, who had ironically set out for so long to kill the only other monster, is already weary in his fulfilled loss. He stands, battered and beaten in the ruins of this world, a solitary monster who always had a name, a wonderful name.

But there is no one around to call him by it.

--

Fin


End file.
